I found the excerpts interesting. It's fascinating to get a glimpse into the production travails, and seeing confirmation that some things fans have argued about for years are, as expected, simply oversights by a production probably scrambling to stay on schedule (e.g. “Lithium Crystal Recharging Section” gets mislabeled "Engineering").

I'm curious what all the sources are. The memos are one thing, but did he interview all these people, or is he quoting other interviews at length?

I do have a concern based on these excerpts: the author editorializes too much, both via word choice ("the sloppiness continued") and in stating things which are not factual ("It may very well have been the best-staged fight shot for TV.").

Furthermore, there are some weirdly unexplained things like "The scenes in the alternate engineering set were planned to come next". What? What "alternate engineering set"? Does this mean in the script we are seeing two different Enterprises, one in each universe? Or does he mean the mislabeled lithium recharghing station? Impossible to decipher from the way it's worded.

So, it looks worth reading for the direct quotes, but I'm leery of the author's opinions, conclusions and lack of specificity.

According to the author's website, the three books contains hundreds of previously unpublished interviews, which he conducted. The cover art and lax prose seem par for the course when it comes to print-on-demand books like this, unfortunately. It is too bad the money raised via Kickstarter couldn't have been used to make improvements in these areas.

The quality of the author's conclusions remains to be seen -- I am leery of anything so openly endorsed by Roddenberry's estate -- but the raw materials of a great book are certainly there.

The extensive quotes from Mars and Banks (who aren't listed as dead on imdb) sure make it seem like they are new interviews, but then that suggests a lot more time than 8 months for the work on this. Maybe 8 months going through the archives, plus however much more doing the interviews?

It seems too good to be true, but I'm jazzed about it ... this may actually make up for some of the missed opportunities Pocket had in the 90s for their ART OF to interview the behind-the-scenes folk before most of them started expiring.

Behind the scenes books on TOS that aren't just rehashes of what we already know with pretty pictures (Star Trek 365) are so far between nowadays that it doesn't have to be that good for me to pick it up.

I didn't know they continued after dark on location for "Shore Leave," using stage lights to simulate daylight. I'll bet those are scenes where the non-sunlight quality led me to think they had shot additional scenes indoors.

There are some shots by Lazarus's little ship in "The Alternative Factor" that look very indoor; now I wonder if they were just out there at night with the studio lamps on.

Also, Bruce Mars adds some evidence to the theory that William Shatner was a nice, normal lead actor, and the whole supporting cast animosity legend was cooked up after the series, behind his back.

I didn't know they continued after dark on location for "Shore Leave," using stage lights to simulate daylight. I'll bet those are scenes where the non-sunlight quality led me to think they had shot additional scenes indoors.

There are some shots by Lazarus's little ship in "The Alternative Factor" that look very indoor; now I wonder if they were just out there at night with the studio lamps on.

Also, Bruce Mars adds some evidence to the theory that William Shatner was a nice, normal lead actor, and the whole supporting cast animosity legend was cooked up after the series, behind his back.

Click to expand...

Yet the Shat stuff about Robert Sparr does lend credence to him throwing his weight around (no pun intended) in ways that weren't necessarily best for the show (and that from a longtime Shat defender.)

I'm going to wait to hear someone received theirs before shelling out bucks, since this appears to be their first book, which to me sounds like-self publishing and I've seen those get delayed and delayed.